Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

Once upon a time, Keira Knightly played a character that was Natalie Portman’s double. The movie, of course, was The Phantom Menace.

Later, Keira Knightly played Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.

So should we be surprised to learn that Natalie Portman is now slated to play an alternative Elizabeth Bennett … in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? I would think not.

When it comes to copyright, the world simply seems to have gone insane.

The UK music industry thinks it loses £200 million each year to piracy. So the UK government is now trying to push through a new set of regulations that would cost £500 million to implement. Which not only does not meet the most basic of cost-benefit analyses, but also would force an estimated 40,000 people offline due to the additional costs that would be passed on to consumers.

Meanwhile, my ISP has promised to start to spy on everything that I download. I cannot recall agreeing to allow them to do this.

But copyright issues in music are old news; the new battle is in books. Book publishers have now realized that many avid readers are now e-book readers, with more to follow on the iPad — now they are beginning to jump into the copyright act. Using the same sorts of measurements that the music and movie industries use, they are claiming to lose $3 billion a year to online piracy. A more interesting analysis takes the same methodology and applies it to libraries, finding that American libraries “cost” the publishing industry nearly $1 trillion every year.

This, of course, demonstrates how silly the claims are. Once one takes into account that those who violate copyright by downloading music, books, or movies are also the industry’s biggest customers, expenditures like those being made in the UK are revealed for being complete farces — rather than protecting profits, it takes away the ability for customers to discover the material in the first place.

There are interesting and sane views out there. Go To Hellman outlines the benefits of library sharing of books. Cory Doctorow discusses the possibility of creating an intelligent copyright system, rather than a one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t work.

None of that intelligent thinking is likely to be finding its way into the Anti-Conterfeiting Trade Agreement, however. The public, of course, is not allowed in on the multilateral negotiations — but big business is. What is sure to emerge are a set of rules to make the demise of the pre-Internet model as painful as possible for consumers and new start-ups, rather than a set of rules that still make sense given the technology available.

And yes, almost all of this has happened during the first 31 days of 2010. And there is no sign that anybody will adopt a system that has any chance of working anytime soon.

(Image from 917press)

A ten year old girl in Commack, NY has been suspended from school for “bringing, and then distributing bottled peppermint oil to other students.” Apparently school authorities there believe that peppermint oil, being used in this case to make water taste minty, is a drug.

(by Brian Dettmer)

Discover asks: What happened to the hominids who might have been smarter than humans?

We all know that Bono is a twat. And when he goes on record in the New York Times, naively suggesting that America could emulate China in tracking content online and eliminating piracy in the process, you could hear the BoingBoing reaction coming. Unfortunately, with Mr. Doctorow on vacation, we will have to wait for the full reaction.